THE WINDOW

lodged now in the fork of a pear tree, for they
had reached the orchard. And with a painful
effort of concentration, she focused her mind,
not upon the silver-bossed bark of the tree, or
upon its fish-shaped leaves, but upon a phantom
kitchen table, one of those scrubbed board tables,
grained and knotted, whose virtue seems to
have been laid bare by years of muscular integrity,
which stuck there, its four legs in air. Naturally,
if one's days were passed in this seeing of angular
essences, this reducing of lovely evenings, with
all their flamingo clouds and blue and silver to a
...white deal four-legged table (and it was a mark
oflSte finest minds so to do), naturally one could
not be judged like an ordinary person.

Mr. Bankes liked her for bidding him " think
of his work ". He had thought of it, often and
often. Times without number, he had said,
" Ramsay is one of those men who do their best
work before they are forty ". He had made
a definite contribution to philosophy in one little
book when he was only five and twenty; what
came after was more or less amplification, repeti-
tion. But the number of men who make a
definite contribution to anything whatsoever is
very small, he said, pausing by the pear tree, well
brushed, scrupulously exact, exquisitely judicial.
Suddenly, as if the movement of his hand had